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Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)
🕑 Added 2021-04-30 18:14:16 +0000 UTC
I decided to close out Hitchcock Month with Shadow of a Doubt mostly because I read that it was the director's personal favorite. I think I can see why. In certain respects it's a very strange film, and I wonder whether Hitchcock felt as though he'd taken a few liberties with it without arousing any suspicions of self-indulgence. It can certainly be taken as a star vehicle for Joseph Cotten, and a reasonably entertaining, tightly wound chaos machine. The family at its center is comically bizarre, all the more so for being (falsely) tapped as an Average American Household. And the paradox is that Uncle Charlie (Cotten) and his dissociational psychosis introduces a level of calm into the Newton family circle.
But this is a film with a whole lot going on. First of all, it's the most overtly painterly Hitchcock I've seen. Of course Vertigo engages in more abstraction, but Shadow of a Doubt's treatment of space and landscape offer something quite different. Many of the long shots (especially in the opening segment, when the detectives are chasing Charlie) have the expansive feel of Gainsborough or Turner. I suspect there was a touch of perversity on Hitchcock's part locating an ersatz English countryside in the middle of Northern California. But perhaps more than this, the visual treatment gives the lie to apparent normalcy. The world is huge and overwhelming and a bit frightening anywhere you go, depending on whether or not you're really looking at it.
The interiors of Shadow of a Doubt perform a different kind of work. We see the Expressionist lines and angles that became part of the vernacular of film noir, but it's all put to another purpose. This film inverts the gender relations of noir, introducing Charlie as the homme fatale, and his niece Charlie (Teresa Wright) is the one he seduces. This unfolds in a number of interesting ways. For one thing, Uncle Charlie seems to Young Charlie like the breath of fresh air that will shake up she perceives to be a stultifying existence. But of course, Shadow of a Doubt is primarily about her coming of age and her loss of an innocence she wasn't even aware she had. This is unique in Hitchcock, but not unprecedented. His protagonists are usually men, but in a few other cases (especially The Birds) the focus is on women struggling to articulate their interior lives.
And in the process of this education, Young Charlie [sorry, there's no elegant way to discuss the doubling] discovers a few things. First, her crush on Uncle Charlie is requited in the most disturbing way possible. Some of his overtures toward her are almost openly lecherous. But more than this, Uncle Charlie wants to impress upon her that they share more than a name. He wants her to believe that she is like him -- misanthropic to the point of sociopathy, capable to adopting his warped view of the world and, ultimately, forming a twisted little family in plain sight of the mundane community. If Uncle Charlie can "turn" Young Charlie, it means both that he has indeed found his "family," and that his nihilistic perspective has been validated.
In this regard, I would not be at all surprised if Shadow of a Doubt were David Lynch's favorite Hitchcock. There is a proto-Blue Velvet ambiance here, in that perversion and corruption are always already at work in the most seemingly banal American landscapes. Yes, Uncle Charlie is the catalyst, and he is more worldly than any of the Newtons. But his real aim is to groom Young Charlie into his true double. He wants her to keep his secrets, and he frames this demand in terms of protecting Young Charlie's mother (Patricia Collinge). The daughter recognizes that her mother is fragile, but her decision to protect her from Uncle Charlie's crimes has as much to do with negative-projection. She loves her mother, but is terrified of becoming her. So if she can live with knowledge that would destroy her mother, that means she's constitutionally distinct.
The other aspect of Shadow of a Doubt that is worth mentioning is Det. Jack Graham (Macdonald Carey) and his instant infatuation with Young Charlie. It's easy to look at this as the weakest, most nonsensical aspect of the film, and in some ways it is. But I think that Graham is, in some ways, even creepier than Uncle Charlie, and this offers Young Charlie a foretaste of how emotionally disfiguring the world is for a young woman. She may have some feelings for Graham, but she also seems to recognize that he has chosen her for virtually no reason and aims to make her his girlfriend almost by fiat. Watching all these Hitchcocks has confirmed the sense I've always gotten from the films of his I'd seen, that the director empathizes and even identifies with women -- their impossible circumstances, their thwarted desires, and their constant struggle in navigating a brutally patriarchal world. Young Charlie has had her eyes opened all right, but she sends Graham away because she'd rather spend the last few years of her youth in the Newton family, where she is at least somewhat free. She knows that it's only a matter of time until the walls close in around her.
Comments
Apart from (or maybe via) its influence on Lynch, this film also lurks in the DNA of so much "edgy" prestige TV about the dark side of Middle America.
